Look, I know what you’re thinking. “Why?” To which I say: Wrong question. The real question is: How?

Flappy Bird, that infuriatingly addictive game, was the perfect candidate for a real-world upgrade. One button. One mechanic. Infinite frustration. I wanted to take that digital pain and make it physical.

So I built it.

The whole thing runs on a mechanical bird perched on a stepper driven slider system that "jumps" every time you hit a giant arcade-style button. Pipes scroll past on a conveyor system driven by stepper motors, precisely timed to mess with your rhythm. There’s a split-flap scoring system, collision detection using a pogo-pin and magnet system, and yes, a secondary game-over screen—on real hardware.

And when I say it plays just like the original, I mean it. The bird’s got real inertia. Miss a flap and it faceplants. Thread the gap and you feel like a hero. It's brutal, beautiful, and deeply overengineered for something that fits on a phone screen.

The hardest part? Timing. I had to tune every movement—the flap delay, the pipe speed, the scoring trigger—until it felt like Flappy Bird. Not looked like. Felt like. That’s the kind of nonsense that made this project worth it.

This wasn’t just about nostalgia. It was about proving you can take even the most digital game and engineer it into the real world. Because pixels are cool, but plastic, gears, and gravity? Way cooler.

You can watch the full project video here: